Posted by Joelle on October 15, 2013

With Halloween lurking just around the shadowed bend, we conjured up a list of 13 of 2013's most fright-inducing reads to get you in the spirit. Haunted houses, werewolves, vampires and serial killers—this list has got them all, and more!

South African novelist Lauren Beukes returns with The Shining Girls, a creepy, supernatural thriller set in Chicago, where a dilapidated House (yes, capital “H”) containing a mysterious portal sends the book’s villain back and forth through time. Throughout the 20th century, he dispatches a series of women in brutal fashion, removing a small item from one victim here, depositing it with another there, then materializing back at the House to review his exploits. (Read the full review.)

Stroke by stroke, scare by scare, [Boyne's] latest novel deliberately sets out to beat Henry James at the diabolical game he played in the best ghost story of all time, The Turn of the Screw. Boyne’s mimicry and mischievous corruption of both the form and the content of James’s tale are surely the book’s most uncanny elements. All the Jamesian paraphernalia is there: the clueless governess at the remote country estate who narrates the story; her predecessors who meet violent ends; the nervous bystanders who infuriate both the heroine and the reader with their stupendous reserve. (Read the full review.)

John Connolly’s Charlie Parker books push the limits of the whodunit genre. They read like detective novels, but then they step over the line into Stephen King country, where apparitions dance at the periphery of the senses and where evil becomes palpable—and ever so believable. Connolly’s latest, The Wrath of Angels, finds the intrepid P.I. sitting in a bar, listening to a strange tale about a private airplane that went down in the dense woods of northern Maine. (Read the full review.)

Never before has Gaiman’s fiction felt this personal, this vibrant or this deeply intimate. Gaiman’s hero is an unnamed narrator who returns to his childhood home as an adult and is flooded with memories of a farm at the end of the English country lane where he grew up. We relive those boyhood memories as he does, beginning with an odd tragedy that brought him to the doorstep of the Hempstock family. There he met 11-year-old Lettie, her mother and her ancient grandmother, who claims she was around when the moon was first made. (Read the full review.)

Joe Hill says it took him quite a while to find the spark that would make his riveting new horror novel roar to life. Though he ended up writing the bulk of NOS4A2 in about seven months, getting the book started wasn’t easy. “I struggled with figuring out how I wanted to write a female lead,” Hill says. . . . The novel’s main character, Victoria McQueen, is a tough, wild thing with an unusual talent. When we meet her as a young girl, Vic has just discovered that sometimes, much to her surprise, her beloved Raleigh bicycle takes her to a covered bridge that shouldn’t exist. (Read the full interview with Hill.)

Hill's allure—whether in these two novellas or in her famous 1987 novel, The Woman in Black, adapted for the London stage in 1989 and playing there ever since—springs from the serene decorum of her prose, which remains mellifluous even at the most catastrophic turn of events. This set of novellas provides another “safe haven” for those fans who prefer to take their horror with a smooth pint of bitter. (Read the full review.)

In an author’s note at the end of Doctor Sleep, Stephen King explains how the idea of writing a sequel to The Shining—his third novel, published in 1977—was planted by a fan at a book signing back in 1998. King mulled it over for more than 10 years before sitting down to figure out how 5-year-old Danny Torrance fared after his narrow escape from the horrifyingly haunted Overlook Hotel. As one might suspect, Danny didn’t fare very well. (Read the full review.)

The perilous pleasures and imperiled children that await you in John Lindqvist’s magnificent collection of stories, Let the Old Dreams Die, require constant illumination. The darkness of this writer’s imagination is profound, the terrors manifold and the writing merciless in its reckoning of every human being’s worst fears, groundless hopes and bizarre capacity to love against all mortal odds. It would be tempting to call Lindqvist a philosopher, so relentless are the questions his characters ask about the meaning and the meaninglessness of our existence. (Read the full review.)

“All love is desperate.” With this phrase, celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates manifests love gone wrong in Evil Eye, four novellas ringing with Gothic horror. Taking a page from du Maurier’s Rebecca, Oates puppeteers her childlike heroines through scenes of despondency set in the twisted, delusional reality that can be love, with the backdrop of oppressive circumstances and possessive men with gnarled secrets. (Read the full review.)

When you talk of talented writers under 40, Benjamin Percy is a name that must come up. His second novel is Red Moon, a fat, multilayered page-turner that has fans of Percy and lycanthropy alike gnashing their teeth in anticipation. Yes, it’s about werewolves, but it is also about coming of age, young love, racism, xenophobia, warfare’s moral complexities and the zeitgeist of 21st-century America. (Read the full review.)

Scott McGrath is the novel’s central character. Once a prominent investigative journalist, his career has very publicly crashed and burned after he made outrageous accusations and a not-so-veiled threat against the elusive cult filmmaker Stanislas Cordova. When McGrath learns that Cordova’s 24-year-old daughter Ashley has been found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. McGrath sets out to solve the mystery of Ashley’s death, but ends up on a risky and very different sort of journey in pursuit of an entirely different magnitude of truth. (Read the full review.)

David Ullman is a prestigious professor specializing in biblical literature and tales of demons, and one of the world’s foremost experts on John Milton’s epic poem of heaven and hell, Paradise Lost. Though religious literature is his specialty, David doesn’t believe a word of it. His interest is unshakably academic, until a woman visits his office with a strange proposition. Just days later, tragedy strikes, and David finds himself battling dark forces and a ticking clock in a desperate effort to get his daughter Tess back. (Read the full review.)

Sarah and Jennifer believed that to be informed was to be prepared, so they became versed in all of the statistics of threatening situations and created a list of things to never do. They strictly followed the list until one night in college when they got in a car with a stranger—a devastating choice that led to five years of unspeakable torture, as Sarah and Jennifer were held captive with two other girls in an unforgiving cellar. (Read the full review.)

Posted by Eliza on January 16, 2013

Time and time again, we have learned that BookPage readers have a soft spot for suspense. In January, we recommend 12 books that will appeal to a range of mystery lovers—from those who love adventure thrillers, to those who read historical mysteries or classic police procedurals.

For fans of supernatural whodunits:Read The Wrath of Angels, John Connolly’s new Charlie Parker thriller. Tierney writes: The books in the series "read like detective novels, but then they step over the line into Stephen King country, where apparitions dance at the periphery of the senses and where evil becomes palpable—and ever so believable."

For fans of police procedurals:Read Watching the Dark, Peter Robinson's latest mystery starring Chief Inspector Alan Banks. The story gets going when a homicide is performed via crossbow, and then Banks must race from Yorkshire to Estonia to solve the crime. Tierney writes: "Taut suspense, complex characters and deft storytelling combine in this whodunit tour-de-force."

For fans of Irish noir:Read Ratlines, Stuart Neville's edgy political thriller set in Ireland, 1963. The plot kicks off when a Nazi war criminal is murdered, and investigator Albert Ryan must find the killer. (Nazi collaborators were given sanctuary and new identities in postwar Ireland.) Tierney writes: "The setup is real-life history and the rest is 'just a story.' But what a story it is!

For fans of "Law & Order":Read The Intercept by "Law & Order" producer Dick Wolf, a tale of modern-day terrorism starring NYPD detective Jeremy Fisk. Tierney writes: "In moving from the small screen to the printed page, Wolf has clearly lost not one iota of his ability to deliver first-rate suspense 'ripped from the headlines.'"

For fans of romantic suspense:Read Dream Eyes by Jayne Ann Krentz, this month's Top Pick in Romance. The paranormal adventure story centers on the romance between a psychic counselor and a psychic investigator. Romance columnist Christie Ridgway writes: "Imaginative and exciting, this tale will have readers guessing (and second-guessing) their way to its conclusion."

For fans of historical mysteries:Read A Study in Revenge by Kieran Shields, which begins when police deputy Archie Lean is called on to view a crime scene in Maine, 1893—strange occult symbols are drawn near a corpse. Then Lean and private detective Perceval Grey are off and running on their second sleuthing adventure, after 2012's The Truth of All Things. (Read more.)

For fans of psychological suspense:Read Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman, a haunting debut that starts ominously when Nora Hamilton wakes up to find her husband dead—by his own hand, she's told. But all is not as it seems in Nora's remote town in the Adirondacks, where secrets are buried in the snow . . . (Read more.)

For fans of Southern Gothic mysteries:Read The Drowning House, a "remarkable blend of human drama and satisfyingly Southern Gothic mystery, propelled by [debut author Elizabeth Black's] lyrical, haunting narration." The story is set in Galveston, Texas. Black is a debut author to watch. (Read more.)

For fans of action and adventure:Read The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter, a thriller in which fictional ballistics expert Bob Lee Swagger attempts to solve America's most baffling murder mystery: Who killed JFK? (This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination.) Read an interview with the author here.

For fans of literary suspense who want something for their book club:Read The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan, the BookPage staff favorite that takes place in 1914 after a luxury liner sinks and leaves a group of survivors on a too-small lifeboat. A pick in this month's book clubs column, The Lifeboat came out in paperback on January 8. (Read more.)

For fans of crime novels on audio:Listen to Phantom by Jo Nesbø, in which ex-cop Harry Hole comes back to Oslo and digs into a complex, crime-infested world. Audio columnist Sukey Howard writes: "Subplots within subplots, ingeniously fleshed-out characters and an extraordinary performance by Robin Sachs make this the best Nesbø/Hole novel yet."

For fans of spy thrillers on audio:Listen to Young Philby by Robert Littell, an espionage thriller based on real-life double agent Kim Philby. Philby was a British Secret Service agent spying for the Soviets during the Cold War. Howard chose this for the Top Pick in Audio for January, writing: "A living, breathing Philby emerges, but his true heart, motives, treachery or abiding patriotism (a minority view) stay fascinatingly clouded by the smoke and mirrors of real-life espionage."

What mystery novels are you reading (or listening to) this month? Will any of these suggestions make it to your TBR? Let us know in the comments!